Partner Content

A partner’s perspective on working with Sharakat

Saudi Arabia’s water scarcity is at the centre of a blossoming infrastructure market, with private partners at its core. Its prosperity is reflected in the success of a number of flagship projects

By SHARAKAT

The Regent Emirates Pearl hotel rises 255 metres above Abu Dhabi’s seafront and stakes its claim as one of the emirate’s most recognisable structures.

The mixed-use complex contains 60 luxury serviced apartments on 10 levels, and a five-star hotel with 437 keys from level 11 upwards. The podium area includes five levels of restaurants, retail areas, spas, swimming pools and a gym. Below are five levels of parking.

The building’s signature feature is the 45-storey twisting elliptical floor plan and columns. Post-tensioned concrete slabs frame the tower’s floor levels and allowed for an efficient construction cycle and obstruction-free ceiling. Each tower column transfers at the podium roof through an arrangement of splayed sloping columns. Three-storey sloping columns at the building’s mid-height levels connect each perimeter column to the core.

The real mixed-use space and the twisting nature of the building presented great challenges to the construction team. While visually arresting, the 1.4-million-square-foot facility required extensive modelling and analysis to accommodate its complex geometries.

The sloping columns mean the building rotates at each level, inducing a torsional force in the elliptical concrete core wall, with the force accumulating over the height of the building. DeSimone analysed the torsional force, and formulated a solution to relieve the torsion from the core.